Following the version of the medieval Latin bestiaries, Gregory McNamee has written a publication right away naturalistic, folkloristic, and literary, made of brief essays on forty-three animals of the world’s deserts. those essays talk about the creatures as they're and as they're imagined, and produce their ordinary lives and histories vividly to the web page.

Recounts how the mythical Swiss people hero, compelled to shoot an apple from his son's head by way of the evil governor, catalyzed the Swiss mountaineers' insurrection opposed to Austrian tyranny within the early 1300's.

An individual who has ever crammed in a sort in triplicate, taken a flair try, or been rebuffed by means of a kind letter will relish the city folklore present in this assortment. city humans as a folks are sure jointly by means of their unsatisfied reports in scuffling with "the system," even if that procedure is the equipment of presidency or the workplace the place one works.

The Tomáraho, a subgroup of the Ishir (Chamacoco) of Paraguay, are one of many few final indigenous populations who've controlled to maintain either their language and non secular ideals intact. they've got lived for a few years in a distant sector of the Gran Chaco, having constrained touch with eu or Latin American cultures.

Extra info for A Desert Bestiary: Folklore, Literature, and Ecological Thought from the World's Dry Places

Example text

These lie in the so-called horse latitudes, where constant high-pressure systems separate the westerlies and trade winds, driving away the rain clouds, swirling above the earth to the music of global temperature variations and the Coriolis effect produced by the earth's rotation in space. Some of those drylands, like the Atacama of Chile, the Namib and Kalahari deserts of southern Africa, and the western Australian desert, are the result of cold oceanic currents that divert rain-laden air away from coastlines.

The Zulu kings pointed to the example of the ants, especially the weaver (Oecophylla longinoda), whose tent-like colonies spread over dozens of baobab trees at a time and number half a million individuals governed by a single monarch, as models of social organization. " Yet those who see in social-insect societies a model for human societies, as some lesser advocates of sociobiology have suggested, should beware. As Arnold Toynbee writes, "insect societies and Utopias are both patently in a state of arrested development," and we have little to learn from either if we are to live as humans in the world.

This would, I think, tend to prejudice a person against ants, but the inhabitants of Arnhem Land seem not to hold the sorcery against the insects. The entomologist Justin 0. Schmidt has concocted a rating scale for the bites of various venomous insects and reptiles. By that scale, the bite of a fire ant is akin to a mild shock of static electricity, that of the harvester ant somewhat more severe, as if someone were using a power drill to excavate a painfully ingrown toenail, and that of a bullet ant even more fierce, the equivalent of walking over coals with a heelful of iron nails.